


Land of the Lotus Eaters

by byzantienne



Category: In Nomine
Genre: F/M, Superior slash, angels & demons, written in: 2005
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-22
Updated: 2005-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-20 23:21:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/893087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why not to pick up Archangels in bars, when you're a Prince of Hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Land of the Lotus Eaters

**Author's Note:**

> Repost of _ancient_ fic (2005!), lightly edited.
> 
> Originally written for a weird pairings challenge back on LiveJournal, and I still like it enough -- this is Kobal, the Demon Prince of Dark Humor (once, a long time ago, the Archangel of Laughter), and Gabriel, the Archangel of Fire, Messenger and Prophet of God, and _not at all right in the head_.
> 
> (For, in a sense, Fade & Beth, who are going to get me writing in this fandom again. Sorry that what I've ended up salvaging is the Weird Superior Slash.)

Kobal sits on his ratty easy chair with the stuffing hanging out the bottom, his chin on his knees, and thinks about his apartment. The plaster is falling off the walls in damp, moldy chuncs, and roaches almost as long as his index finger crawl out of the holes. The landlord charges three-fifty a month, _plus_ utilities, and doesn't turn on the heat until January. The cracks on the ceiling have spread since the last time he buggered off from Shal-Mari to spend a weekend out in the city.

It's _better_ than Hell. It's full of humans, scrabbling and hopeless and desperate and still thinking they'll get out, still thinking they'll fucking _succeed_. They're alive and they stink of sweat and fear and Essence. They keep _trying_ until they burn out or shoot up or fire guns at their screaming babies at 2 AM because the heat is too bad and explain sobbing to the cops that they didn't mean to, officer, it's just the kid wouldn't shut up. It's so damn _funny_ he can't stand it. And it feels good. Still feels good. An explosion behind his eyelids, knowing that ten million human beings are packed into three square miles, tearing themselves apart because they don't _know better_ than to give up.  
  
The couple upstairs are fucking, loudly. Their bed creaks and the woman makes long low noises that might be _more_ and might be _stop_. Earlier they'd been shouting, shoving the furniture around and slamming the doors. Kobal thinks about covering his ears and doesn't, because at least they're trying. There's no artifice. Shal-Mari's all artifice, these days. Trying to make him laugh, as if that mattered.  
  
He isn't looking at the woman on his bed, at the messy, sex-stained sheets, at the palm-shaped scorchmarks on the wall where she'd held on while he'd pushed himself into her from behind. She'd been slick, hot around him, moving her hips in tight, controlled circles, tossing her head. She'd laughed. All the way through, laughing until she screamed and the muscles inside her spasmed, clenching and making it impossible for him to think.  
  
The apartment is his, but she's the one who fits in it, ribcage prominent under desert-colored skin, her eyes as hollow as any junkie's. She sits up, draws her knees up to her chest, mirroring him.  
  
“Missed you,” she says. Her voice is small, like a child's.  
  
“Fuck off, Gabriel,” Kobal replies.  
  
Gabriel giggles. “We did that already.” She touches the dark hair that hangs lank at the side of her face. Pets it. “You taste like oceans. Also, your wall has a hole in it.”  
  
“And you like slumming.”  
  
“Oh, no,” she tells him, tipping her head back. The line of her throat is an ashy hollow. The laughter she's holding back bubbles out from the sides of her voice. “I just like honesty. Mahler's daughter died in a Nazi concentration camp in the second World War. He wrote the Ninth Symphony for her.”  
  
“And Sid killed Nancy. Come on, Prophet of God, tragedy's fucking _everywhere_. So what?” He can't remember why he brought her back from the bar he'd found her in, except that even his vessels get drunk (it's funnier when they do), and really. The Archangel Gabriel in a ragged dress, dancing in a bar where there wasn't any music.  
  
She points at him with a bitten fingernail, straight-armed. “Tragedy's fucking everywhere.”  
  
Inconsiderate _bitch_. “Wrong Word, honey.”  
  
She smiles at him, and her junkie's eyes are glittering with a thousand grains of desert sand. “I know what happened to you,” she says. It's this awful lilt, a playground chant from a nasty kid.  
  
“What is this, the 'come home, we still love you and it'll all be _okay_ ' lecture? I may be _bored_ , Gabe honey, but I'm not _that_ bored.”  
  
“Bored enough to fuck an angel,” she says, razor-sharp and matter-of-fact. For a moment he thinks she sounds sane, and the skin where his wings would be in Hell is a mass of tiny pinpricks. He doesn't look at her face.  
  
“So?”  
  
“Lotus-eater,” she replies. She's playing with little flames that grow out of her fingernails, and he can hear the tiny ripples of disturbance she isn't bothering to shield. It's a low-grade drone, and it's going to bring down any Celestial who's even remotely in the area.  
  
Not that he can't handle it. He's a _Prince_ of _Hell_. But this is his private little corner of dissipation.  
  
“Stop that,” he tells her.  
  
“You're not _listening_ ,” Gabriel snaps. She flops back on the mattress in a disarrayed pile of limbs. “No one _listens_ to me.”  
  
“Cassandra's the second-oldest joke in the book,” he tells her, and wonders why he's bothering to explain.  
  
“I never liked Apollo,” she says, as if that makes sense of anything. "And Poseidon never liked me."  
  
She can never say anything straight, and Kobal ran out of mad prophet jokes back in the twelfth century. He unfolds himself from the chair and walks naked to the grimy window, kicking an empty pizza box out of the way.  
  
She's still talking, babbling nonsense. Like usual. He isn't a Balseraph, so he isn't going to tell himself that he doesn't miss the _old_ Gaby. Whatever the Hell that one was fixated on, at least he'd say it clearly.  
  
Not as good of a fuck, though. _That's_ funny.  
  
There are hot hands on his shoulders and then an Archangel pressed up against his back, hipbones sharp where they push against his ass. “I _know_ ,” she whispers into his ear. “I _found out_ and I've eaten your fruit all up and I remember what it is now.” She bites. He spins and shoves her away.  
  
She falls ungracefully, a heap of thin arms and legs at the foot of the bed. Her hand goes up to her mouth and presses there, as if she was holding in a gasp. She looks surprised. Hurt.  
  
Kobal turns back to the window and watches a fat man in ill-fitting sweatpants walk into a convenience store. He doesn't listen when the angel on his floor picks herself up, or when she says again that she missed him. He does not listen to the ringing disturbance that marks her leaving.  
  
Afterwards he tries to scrub the scorchmarks off the wall. He's never cleaned this apartment before.


End file.
